Do you know that you don't have to be Asian in race or ethnicity in order to be Asian? If you're around Asian people long enough, you too can be Asian! In fact, Asianness is like the common cold; if you spend a lot of time around someone who has it, you can catch it too!
Take a look at this utterly preposterous piece out of the San Francisco Chronicle. Not only is a total fawning puff piece drooling openly and shamelessly over Obama, it makes the actual argument that Obamessiah is really Asian-American because he has Asian-American friends. Say WHAT?
I'm not making this up. Here is an actual quote:
. . . Could it be that our true first black president might also be our first Asian American president? . . . He was born and raised in Hawaii, the only majority-Asian state in the union; he spent four formative years in Jakarta, the home of his Indonesian stepfather Lolo Soetoro, where he attended local schools and learned passable Bahasa Indonesia. The family with whom he's closest — half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng and her Chinese Canadian husband, Konrad Ng — are Asian American. So, too, are the most senior members of his congressional team — his Senate chief of staff Pete Rouse, whose mother is Japanese American, and his legislative director Chris Lu, whose parents hail from China.
Oh, please! Then I am a raving leftist/tree-hugging global warming alarmist/PLO sympathizer because I happen to be around those kinds of people. While I'm at it, maybe I'm not really Asian-American; by association I'm also Hispanic, black, white, and every other race/ethnicity/group you care to identify on campus because I associate with them.
Identity politics have always been silly. Now it's hit bottom and started digging.
There's a logic bomb in all this too. Identity politics are basically predicated on the idea that identity is something that you have indeliably, inherently, more or less genetically like a blood type; it defines you and should shape all your individual acts because your group identity trumps all else, including individuality ("Vote for Hillary solely because she's a woman and you're a woman, not because her policies are sound" is an example -- ludicrous, I know, but bear with me). But how does this kind of identity work with Obama now, after this little bit of breathless writing?
Are we now going to overturn the idea of genetic identity in favor of a chosen, externally-given identity? Identity that's not inborn, but sourced from somewhere else? Well, then, this means that individual experience/choice/etc. play a role in identity -- that identity is not some kind of monolithic, unchanging status. And thus quivers the entire stupid superstructure of ID politics. This pie-eyed, swooning Obama acolyte, in attempting to make his idol some kind of race-ethnicity superstar, has inadvertently destabilized some basic assumptions of ID politics . . . and done this with a fatuous argument that itself is laughably bad and even more idiotic. Asian by association! What, he's now Asian because he supposedly "understands" Asian people? (Never mind that "Asian" itself is such a huge umbrella term that it means nearly nothing.) Yo, Obamessiah! How about understanding me and my Asian-American opinions about things? No? Too centrist? Not enough taxes, too much hawkishness? Well, phooey.
Come on, people, it's time to behave as responsible adults and say no to race-baiting, race-hustling, and the cynical manipulation of identity politics in every form, including this! We should be looking at the presidential race as Americans first, not as (insert boutique grievance specialty group here) first, Americans second/last.
UPDATE: I just noticed this. In the article, the writer refers to "Asian values" as some monolithic thing . . . and then links that term to the Wikipedia definition. Are you freakin' KIDDING ME?
6 comments:
Good rant. Identity politics could really hurt this nation ...
By the way, I'm Italian-Irish-Czech-American ... and I want my parade NOW!
How about a Ferris Bueller-type parade? Now that's a party!
About the author:
Jeff Yang forecasts global consumer trends for the market-research company Iconoculture [...]. He is the author of "Once Upon a Time in China: A Guide to the Cinemas of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China," co-author of "I Am Jackie Chan: My Life in Action"and "Eastern Standard Time," and editor of the forthcoming "Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology"
C'mon, Maddie! You should look for opponents on par with you...
I think that the author's ideas are in line with post-modern social construction theories of identity. Ethnicity, and gender, are seen as having meaning only in ways determined by society (w/ the individual in question being one determining factor), so such identities are fluid. They change as society changes, and can change as the individual changes. This is one reason Obama is portrayed as a black man, instead of a black and white man.
While I feel that there is an element of social construction to identity, one of the many problems (IMHO) of this is that, as MM points out, there are a lot of illogical claims made. We see this in claims that, e.g., Condoleeza Rice isn't "really" black, as well as many other ways ("Asian values", etc.).
My feeling about a lot (though not all) of identity politics and race/gender studies narratives is that what they really MEAN (but know they can never say) is that race and gender mean what they WANT it to mean, and they will use whatever tools will make reality seem to fit the narrative.
But, that's just my opinion. YMMV.
My feeling about a lot (though not all) of identity politics and race/gender studies narratives is that what they really MEAN (but know they can never say) is that race and gender mean what they WANT it to mean, and they will use whatever tools will make reality seem to fit the narrative.
Precisely! And so identity becomes one more thing to be used as a club against folks a particular group happens to dislike.
Yep, and as an award to elevate folks they happen to like.
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